Photographers have been zooming and cropping photographic images, after capture, since the beginnings of photography. With the availability of zoom taking lenses, viewfinder reticles and masks have been used to show the effects of zooming in the viewfinder, before capture. Zoom viewfinders and digital viewfinders are now generally used to present zoomed light images prior to capture.
Viewfinders that show possible changes in aspect ratio prior to capture have been less common. (For convenience, in the following, the term “cropping” is used to refer only to changes in an image that alter the aspect ratio and “zooming” is used to refer only to changes in an image that alter the relative size, but retain the same aspect ratio.) Some Advanced Photo System™ (“APS”) cameras have had viewfinders that showed available cropping (print aspect ratios). In those cameras, the entire film frame is exposed, an encodement is recorded on the film, and the image is printed in the selected aspect ratio at photofinishing. These approaches are more convenient than cropping after printing, since the user can compose the image based upon a desired final aspect ratio seen in the viewfinder, but these approaches are limited to a few preset cropping values (aspect ratios). The user interface for controlling cropping in these cameras has been very simple, since the available cropping states are very small in number.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,619,738 discloses a hybrid camera, in which the user can edit an image on a display on the back of the camera. The user selects a print format and then moves a marker on the display to zoom, crop, and/or tilt the desired portion of the image. This approach is effective, but is again complex. The image is shown on the display along with marks that define a box showing the size of the edited image. The box is enlarged or reduced in size to indicate zooming. An input element is moved from side to side to effect zooming. The box is moved in left-right and up-down directions to crop, using input elements that move from side to side and up and down, respectively. U.S. Pat. No. 5,675,400 discloses an editor for processed film images that similarly presents a box on a displayed image. The box is zoomed, moved left-right, and moved up-down by three rotatable knobs arranged in a column. The devices disclosed in these patents provide many different cropping and zooming values. On the other hand, the input elements provided for the zooming and cropping functions, are not easily differentiated without looking at them. In U.S. Pat. No. 5,619,738, zooming and left-right movement are provided by adjoining left-right movable input elements. In U.S. Pat. No. 5,675,400, zooming and box movements are provided by rotary knobs. The user must look or remember which knob provides what function. This is not a particular problem for editing images after capture, but would be a hindrance during composition prior to capture.
It would thus be desirable to provide an improved camera and method in which input elements are easily and conveniently used to change cropping during composition, prior to image capture.